Read Excel Data With Multi-Row Column Headers — read_excel_multiple

Variant of read_excel for sheets where column names are split across multiple header rows. The rows are concatenated in order, joined with sep. Supports hierarchical/merged headers via horizontal forward-filling across upper header tiers, isolates text parsing for headers so data col_types do not collide, and performs robust name repair.

Usage

read_excel_multiple_headers(
  path,
  n_header_rows = 2L,
  sheet = 1,
  fill_merged = FALSE,
  sep = " | ",
  clean_names = FALSE,
  trim = TRUE,
  ...
)

Arguments

path: Path to the .xls/.xlsx file.
n_header_rows: Number of header rows in the sheet (positive integer >= 1).
sheet: Sheet to read. Either a string (the name of a sheet), or an integer (the position of the sheet). Defaults to 1.
fill_merged: Logical (default FALSE); if TRUE, handles merged cells in upper header rows by forward-filling non-empty values left-to-right across columns before vertical concatenation.
sep: Character string used to separate header levels. Default " | ".
clean_names: Logical (default FALSE); if TRUE, applies clean_names_keep_labels to sanitize the final column names.
trim: Logical (default TRUE); whether to trim leading/trailing whitespace from header cells.
...: Additional arguments passed to read_excel for reading the data body (e.g. col_types, na, guess_max).

Value

A tibble.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
read_excel_multiple_headers("workbook.xlsx", n_header_rows = 2)
read_excel_multiple_headers("workbook.xlsx", n_header_rows = 2, fill_merged = TRUE)
read_excel_multiple_headers("workbook.xlsx", n_header_rows = 2, clean_names = TRUE)
} # }